Databases are the longest-lived component

Most of you know that I write a technical article each week for the InformIT website - you can see a list of all my articles here. I’ve been writing for that site for – well, a really long time. I have articles all the way back to SQL Server version 7! The question was that we saw a huge uptick for an older SQL Server article there. A question was posed as to whether we should update that article, or remove it since it was on SQL Server 2000. My response? No!

In many firms I work with, the database is the last component to be upgraded. This is true not only with SQL Server, but with Oracle, DB/2 and even PostGres. Why is that? Well, for one thing, it’s the core of the development system – the data store. Changing it often is disruptive. Another factor is “it’s working, leave it alone”. Now I’m not advocating that behavior – I’ve written extensively that you should evaluate each release to see if the benefits it provides outweigh the cost of making the change, and I stand by that. But the fact of the matter is that there is still a lot of SQL Server 2005 out there, even 2000, when we’re up to ten years out of those releases.

So you’ll still see hundreds of articles on the sites I write for that contain older content. It’s marked that way, and we link to newer articles, but you still have a resource if you’re on an older system. Hopefully you’ll find that useful.